Bag Tags

Stretching your vision range will not do the trick,

A plethora of bags all around, which one is your pick?

Many students seek solace in the library as exams start to cross the dates on calendar. It is mildly amusing how productive the library turns us into, a day before the exam. Besides the evident pain of remembering the numerous equations and theories, that we have so efficiently procrastinated  until the last minute, we also have something additional to heighten the grievance barometer. No, I’m not talking about the herculean task of finding a chair to sit down, or the insufficiency of adequate power sockets. What then, you ask? The customary mix-up of bags is what I’m trying to get at.

The misplacement of bags in the library has been an issue of serious concern.  The bags outnumber the racks and thus have to be kept haphazardly on the floor. Similarity of bags and  the exhaustion (after cramming) leads to confusion and as a result bags are exchanged. Now, the inconvenience caused while tracking down this misplaced bag is quite a messy affair. This issue also gulped in our already cluttered webmail, taken over by a pile of “Lost and Found” mails, so intensely that these mails from DOSA were considered as a proclamation: “Semester Exams Are Coming!”

As the problem grew, it was decided that some measures must be taken against this troubling issue; the matter was put up for discussion in the Senate by Vedant Goenka, Senator, Y13.

After a sound deliberation, a committee was constituted to come up with plausible solutions, one of which was the use of Bag Tags with full details of the owner, thereby letting you know when you have mistaken your bag for someone else’s. Bag Tag essentially is a tag which contains all the details and is tied around the bag by means of a string.

Sohil Bansal, the then General Secretary, FMC took the onus of implementation. For implementation, a letter was forwarded to Mr.S.C Shrivastava, Deputy Director, IIT K regarding the same and permission was sought from the librarian, Mr.V.D.Shrivastava. The FMC designed the tags and initially, 500 prints were made available in the library.

To quote Sohil, “We received large number of mails reporting bag exchange, with the start of end-semester examinations. It was the tipping point, and I chose to get the system implemented immediately and provided the library with these tags..”

Bag Tags were appreciated widely by the campus students and reduced the exchange problem to a large extent. They got noticeably popular and started to finish as soon as they made their way, leaving many students (who were late in making the pilgrimage to the library) a tad bit sad that they could not get them.

Reduction of the spam mails to zero was an additional reward for the brains behind this idea. As per Sohil, a similar solution is in progress to tackle the cycle exchange issue, where the name of the owner is likely to be imprinted on the cycle right at the time of purchase.

Written by Bhanu Pratap Singh Tanwar and Mounica Sarla